USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Jack
Richardson Gallows Humor, reprinted in Douglas Messerli and Mac Wellman,
eds. From the Other Side of the Century
II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1998)

With the
announcement of the death of American playwright Jack Richardson on July 1,
2012, I recalled how delighted Mac Wellman and I had been to rediscover his
play Gallows Humor and reprint in our
1998 drama anthology. I immediately reread the play, and enjoyed it even more
this time round.

Richardson's play in two parts is really a study in early 1960s martial relationships
more than it is about a murderer soon to be hung. There is a murderer, indeed,
Walter, locked away for beating his wife to death with a golf
club—"forty-one strokes from the temple to the chin." But Walter was
clearly locked-away even before his tempestuous reaction. A man of complete
order, he cannot abide the prostitute sent to him by the Warden to take the
prisoner's mind off the gallows and lead him to his death with a smile on his
face. Walter, who has also just been served up a large chicken dinner, cannot
even think of eating it, and is horrified by Lucy's carnal appetites, which
includes not only bedding down with him, but consuming the chicken and tossing
its bones into the center of Walter's cell.

Walter is clearly a man of order, determined to clean and organize his
cell up to the very moment of his state-determined death. It is not that he is
unattracted to women, simply that he has no intention of detracting from the
system that has put him into the cell and now has determined the end of his
life. Walter is a number, 43556, and like Zero of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine is thoroughly a man
of the the system, a man whom after the murder of his wife has clearly
abandoned the dizzying world outside the prison walls and now is disturbed by
"perfume and overpowered flesh" of the female with which he has been
provided.We can only suspect that self-imprisonment,
being locked away in an unhappy life, is what led to his frenzied act.

Lucy,
on the other hand, has a job to accomplish, and with philosophical relish
attempts to convince Walter to change his ways, to, after twenty years of
living a meager existence to seek out his reward in her "mouth,
fingertips, and breasts." The first part ends, obviously, with Walter's
being seduced by the joys of life which he was clearly seeking in wife's
murder.

On
the other hand, the Warden and Hangman are even more locked away in their lives
than has been Walter. At least he has gone temporarily mad, has left the
confines of normalcy. Phillip, the unhappy Hangman, is so frustrated with his
life that he has, as is wife describes it, begun to do hundreds of little
things—tossing ashes into his slippers, skipping club meetings, purchasing a
pair of red socks—that reveal his determination to change his life or, as he
puts it, his desire to "open the window and slither down the drainpipe to
disappear forever."

The
morning of Walter's hanging, Phillip is determined to wear a black mask over
his head, like a Medieval figure—an idea met with hardy resistance from the
Warden and Martha, Phillip's. As he goes off to slip on the mask, the Warden
and Martha discuss Phillip's behavior. Sympathizing with what she has had to
endure, the Warden reveals his long-time love for Martha, and, eventually, she
admits her love for him. The Warden also lives in an unhappy relationship, his
own wife having had various sexual encounters with plumbers and other working
men. The two determine to have an encounter, but hilariously cannot even find a
date when they might meet, so involved are they with the society in which they
live. As Phillip returns with his mask, he discovers the two kissing, and,
outraged, insists he that can now leave as he long wanted desired.

Martha off-handedly invites him to first help her with the dishes, and
before he can even comprehend what he has agreed to, he perceives he is trapped,
locked away in his own staid identity, unable to even open the kitchen door.
When it comes time for him to attend the hanging, Lucy must pop the door open,
promising him "something very special for dinner."

At
least Walter has had the courage of his convictions, while these "free"
figures are more locked away in their determined patterns than Walker is in his
cell. As the Prologue, performed by Death, suggests, they too will ultimately
die. Walter has lived a freer life in the short time his has to remain on this
earth, than the Warden, Hangman, and his wife.

If
Richardson's little masterwork seems cynical, it also represents the intense
dissatisfaction with everyday existence that animated other American
playwrights of the time such as Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, and Jack
Gelber—precursors of the later 1960s generation that would ultimately, in only
temporarily, alter definitions of freedom and love.

Unfortunately, Gallows Humor,
was to be the last of Richardson's successful plays. Two further works, Lorenzo and Xmas in Las Vegas closed on Broadway after only four performances
each. Although he long served as drama critic forCommentary,
the author wrote no new plays. He did help his friend Elaine Kaufman establish
her East Side restaurant, Elaine's, suggesting larger tables and promising to
provide writers, which he did.